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Saturday, August 23, 2014

8.41 carat flawless pink up for auction

A pear shaped 8.41 carat pink diamond will highlight the Sotheby's Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite Sale in Hong Kong. The diamond, which will be sold on October 7, is expected to sell for between £7 and £10 million.

It was cut in New York from a 19.54 carat rough and its internally flawless clarity is extremely rare in a pink diamond.

It is “arguably the most desirable pink diamond to appear at auction in recent years,” the auction house said. Internally flawless vivid or fancy intense pink diamonds of more than 8 carats are “virtually unseen.”

The current record price ever paid at auction for a diamond, or any gemstone, is the Graff Pink, a 24.76-carat, fancy intense pink diamond, purchased by Lawrence Graff in Geneva in November 2010 for more than $46.1 million.

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A PR exercise in the UK seems to have failed. On paper it’s perfect, but almost two weeks after London jeweller 77 Diamonds dropped a £12,000 diamond from the edge of space, it still hasn’t been found.

Inside the box containing the 1.14 carat diamond there are two GPS trackers fitted with SIM cards (one Vodafone and one O2). The company calls the number and an SMS is ‘pinged’ back containing the latitude and longitude. Pop that into Google Maps and the package is pinpointed to an area within 500m. What they didn’t bank on is that the parachute would land in one of rural England’s many phone reception black holes - rendering the GPS tracker useless.

Information from the last ‘ping’ placed the parachute approximately where Gainsborough Road meets Willingham Road in Lea, Gainsborough. A company spokesperson concedes it could have landed in a river meaning it could be hundreds of miles from the search zone.